The Empire of the Ants

When Captain Gerilleau received instructions to take his new gunboat, the_Benjamin Constant,_ to Badama on the Batemo arm of the Guaramademaand there assist the inhabitants against a plague of ants, he suspectedthe authorities of mockery. His promotion had been romantic and irregular,the affections of a prominent Brazilian lady and the captain's liquid eyeshad played a part in the process, and the _Diario_ and _OFuturo_ had been lamentably disrespectful in their comments. He felt hewas to give further occasion for disrespect.

He was a Creole, his conceptions of etiquette and discipline werepure-blooded Portuguese, and it was only to Holroyd, the Lancashireengineer who had come over with the boat, and as an exercise in the use ofEnglish--his "th" sounds were very uncertain--that he opened his heart.

"It is in effect," he said, "to make me absurd! What can a man do againstants? Dey come, dey go."

"They say," said Holroyd, "that these don't go. That chap you said was aSambo----"

"Zambo;--it is a sort of mixture of blood."

"Sambo. He said the people are going!"

The captain smoked fretfully for a time. "Dese tings 'ave to happen," hesaid at last. "What is it? Plagues of ants and suchlike as God wills. Derewas a plague in Trinidad--the little ants that carry leaves. Orl derorange-trees, all der mangoes! What does it matter? Sometimes ant armiescome into your houses--fighting ants; a different sort. You go and theyclean the house. Then you come back again;--the house is clean, like new!No cockroaches, no fleas, no jiggers in the floor."

"That Sambo chap," said Holroyd, "says these are a different sort of ant."

The captain shrugged his shoulders, fumed, and gave his attention to acigarette.

Afterwards he reopened the subject. "My dear 'Olroyd, what am I to doabout dese infernal ants?"

The captain reflected. "It is ridiculous," he said. But in the afternoonhe put on his full uniform and went ashore, and jars and boxes came backto the ship and subsequently he did. And Holroyd sat on deck in theevening coolness and smoked profoundly and marvelled at Brazil. They weresix days up the Amazon, some hundreds of miles from the ocean, and eastand west of him there was a horizon like the sea, and to the south nothingbut a sand-bank island with some tufts of scrub. The water was alwaysrunning like a sluice, thick with dirt, animated with crocodiles andhovering birds, and fed by some inexhaustible source of tree trunks; andthe waste of it, the headlong waste of it, filled his soul. The town ofAlemquer, with its meagre church, its thatched sheds for houses, itsdiscoloured ruins of ampler days, seemed a little thing lost in thiswilderness of Nature, a sixpence dropped on Sahara. He was a young man,this was his first sight of the tropics, he came straight from England,where Nature is hedged, ditched, and drained, into the perfection ofsubmission, and he had suddenly discovered the insignificance of man. Forsix days they had been steaming up from the sea by unfrequented channels;and man had been as rare as a rare butterfly. One saw one day a canoe,another day a distant station, the next no men at all. He began toperceive that man is indeed a rare animal, having but a precarious holdupon this land.

He perceived it more clearly as the days passed, and he made his deviousway to the Batemo, in the company of this remarkable commander, who ruledover one big gun, and was forbidden to waste his ammunition. Holroyd waslearning Spanish industriously, but he was still in the present tense andsubstantive stage of speech, and the only other person who had any wordsof English was a negro stoker, who had them all wrong. The second incommand was a Portuguese, da Cunha, who spoke French, but it was adifferent sort of French from the French Holroyd had learnt in Southport,and their intercourse was confined to politenesses and simple propositionsabout the weather. And the weather, like everything else in this amazingnew world, the weather had no human aspect, and was hot by night and hotby day, and the air steam, even the wind was hot steam, smelling ofvegetation in decay: and the alligators and the strange birds, the fliesof many sorts and sizes, the beetles, the ants, the snakes and monkeysseemed to wonder what man was doing in an atmosphere that had no gladnessin its sunshine and no coolness in its night. To wear clothing wasintolerable, but to cast it aside was to scorch by day, and expose anampler area to the mosquitoes by night; to go on deck by day was to beblinded by glare and to stay below was to suffocate. And in the daytimecame certain flies, extremely clever and noxious about one's wrist andankle. Captain Gerilleau, who was Holroyd's sole distraction from thesephysical distresses, developed into a formidable bore, telling the simplestory of his heart's affections day by day, a string of anonymous women,as if he was telling beads. Sometimes he suggested sport, and they shot atalligators, and at rare intervals they came to human aggregations in thewaste of trees, and stayed for a day or so, and drank and sat about, and,one night, danced with Creole girls, who found Holroyd's poor elements ofSpanish, without either past tense or future, amply sufficient for theirpurposes. But these were mere luminous chinks in the long grey passage ofthe streaming river, up which the throbbing engines beat. A certainliberal heathen deity, in the shape of a demi-john, held seductive courtaft, and, it is probable, forward.

But Gerilleau learnt things about the ants, more things and more, at thisstopping-place and that, and became interested in his mission.

"Dey are a new sort of ant," he said. "We have got to be--what do you callit?--entomologie? Big. Five centimetres! Some bigger! It is ridiculous. Weare like the monkeys---sent to pick insects... But dey are eating up thecountry."

He burst out indignantly. "Suppose--suddenly, there are complications withEurope. Here am I--soon we shall be above the Rio Negro--and my gun,useless!"

He nursed his knee and mused.

"Dose people who were dere at de dancing place, dey 'ave come down. Dey'ave lost all they got. De ants come to deir house one afternoon. Everyonerun out. You know when de ants come one must--everyone runs out and theygo over the house. If you stayed they'd eat you. See? Well, presently deygo back; dey say, 'The ants 'ave gone.' ... De ants _'aven't_ gone.Dey try to go in--de son, 'e goes in. De ants fight."

"Swarm over him?"

"Bite 'im. Presently he comes out again--screaming and running. He runspast them to the river. See? He gets into de water and drowns de ants--yes." Gerilleau paused, brought his liquid eyes close to Holroyd's face,tapped Holroyd's knee with his knuckle. "That night he dies, just as if hewas stung by a snake."

"Poisoned--by the ants?"

"Who knows?" Gerilleau shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps they bit himbadly... When I joined dis service I joined to fight men. Dese things,dese ants, dey come and go. It is no business for men."

After that he talked frequently of the ants to Holroyd, and whenever theychanced to drift against any speck of humanity in that waste of water andsunshine and distant trees, Holroyd's improving knowledge of the languageenabled him to recognise the ascendant word _Saüba_, more and morecompletely dominating the whole.

He perceived the ants were becoming interesting, and the nearer he drew tothem the more interesting they became. Gerilleau abandoned his old themesalmost suddenly, and the Portuguese lieutenant became a conversationalfigure; he knew something about the leaf-cutting ant, and expanded hisknowledge. Gerilleau sometimes rendered what he had to tell to Holroyd. Hetold of the little workers that swarm and fight, and the big workers thatcommand and rule, and how these latter always crawled to the neck and howtheir bites drew blood. He told how they cut leaves and made fungus beds,and how their nests in Caracas are sometimes a hundred yards across. Twodays the three men spent disputing whether ants have eyes. The discussiongrew dangerously heated on the second afternoon, and Holroyd saved thesituation by going ashore in a boat to catch ants and see. He capturedvarious specimens and returned, and some had eyes and some hadn't. Also,they argued, do ants bite or sting?

"Dese ants," said Gerilleau, after collecting information at a rancho,"have big eyes. They don't run about blind--not as most ants do. No! Deyget in corners and watch what you do."

"And they sting?" asked Holroyd.

"Yes. Dey sting. Dere is poison in the sting." He meditated. "I do not seewhat men can do against ants. Dey come and go."

"But these don't go."

"They will," said Gerilleau.

Past Tamandu there is a long low coast of eighty miles without anypopulation, and then one comes to the confluence of the main river and theBatemo arm like a great lake, and then the forest came nearer, came atlast intimately near. The character of the channel changes, snags abound,and the _Benjamin Constant_ moored by a cable that night, under thevery shadow of dark trees. For the first time for many days came a spellof coolness, and Holroyd and Gerilleau sat late, smoking cigars andenjoying this delicious sensation. Gerilleau's mind was full of ants andwhat they could do. He decided to sleep at last, and lay down on amattress on deck, a man hopelessly perplexed, his last words, when healready seemed asleep, were to ask, with a flourish of despair, "What canone do with ants?... De whole thing is absurd."

Holroyd was left to scratch his bitten wrists, and meditate alone.

He sat on the bulwark and listened to the little changes in Gerilleau'sbreathing until he was fast asleep, and then the ripple and lap of thestream took his mind, and brought back that sense of immensity that hadbeen growing upon him since first he had left Para and come up the river.The monitor showed but one small light, and there was first a littletalking forward and then stillness. His eyes went from the dim blackoutlines of the middle works of the gunboat towards the bank, to the blackoverwhelming mysteries of forest, lit now and then by a fire-fly, andnever still from the murmur of alien and mysterious activities...

It was the inhuman immensity of this land that astonished and oppressedhim. He knew the skies were empty of men, the stars were specks in anincredible vastness of space; he knew the ocean was enormous anduntamable, but in England he had come to think of the land as man's. InEngland it is indeed man's, the wild things live by sufferance, grow onlease, everywhere the roads, the fences, and absolute security runs. In anatlas, too, the land is man's, and all coloured to show his claim to it--in vivid contrast to the universal independent blueness of the sea. He hadtaken it for granted that a day would come when everywhere about theearth, plough and culture, light tramways and good roads, an orderedsecurity, would prevail. But now, he doubted.

This forest was interminable, it had an air of being invincible, and Manseemed at best an infrequent precarious intruder. One travelled for miles,amidst the still, silent struggle of giant trees, of strangulatingcreepers, of assertive flowers, everywhere the alligator, the turtle, andendless varieties of birds and insects seemed at home, dweltirreplaceably--but man, man at most held a footing upon resentfulclearings, fought weeds, fought beasts and insects for the barestfoothold, fell a prey to snake and beast, insect and fever, and waspresently carried away. In many places down the river he had beenmanifestly driven back, this deserted creek or that preserved the name ofa _casa_, and here and there ruinous white walls and a shatteredtower enforced the lesson. The puma, the jaguar, were more the mastershere...

Who were the real masters?

In a few miles of this forest there must be more ants than there are menin the whole world! This seemed to Holroyd a perfectly new idea. In a fewthousand years men had emerged from barbarism to a stage of civilisationthat made them feel lords of the future and masters of the earth! But whatwas to prevent the ants evolving also? Such ants as one knew lived inlittle communities of a few thousand individuals, made no concertedefforts against the greater world. But they had a language, they had anintelligence! Why should things stop at that any more than men had stoppedat the barbaric stage? Suppose presently the ants began to storeknowledge, just as men had done by means of books and records, useweapons, form great empires, sustain a planned and organised war?

Things came back to him that Gerilleau had gathered about these ants theywere approaching. They used a poison like the poison of snakes. Theyobeyed greater leaders even as the leaf-cutting ants do. They werecarnivorous, and where they came they stayed...

The forest was very still. The water lapped incessantly against the side.About the lantern overhead there eddied a noiseless whirl of phantommoths.

Gerilleau stirred in the darkness and sighed. "What can one _do?_" hemurmured, and turned over and was still again.

Holroyd was roused from meditations that were becoming sinister by the humof a mosquito.

II.

The next morning Holroyd learnt they were within forty kilometres ofBadama, and his interest in the banks intensified. He came up whenever anopportunity offered to examine his surroundings. He could see no signs ofhuman occupation whatever, save for a weedy ruin of a house and thegreen-stained facade of the long-deserted monastery at Mojû, with a foresttree growing out of a vacant window space, and great creepers netted acrossits vacant portals. Several flights of strange yellow butterflies withsemi-transparent wings crossed the river that morning, and many alighted onthe monitor and were killed by the men. It was towards afternoon that theycame upon the derelict _cuberta_.

She did not at first appear to be derelict; both her sails were set andhanging slack in the afternoon calm, and there was the figure of a mansitting on the fore planking beside the shipped sweeps. Another manappeared to be sleeping face downwards on the sort of longitudinal bridgethese big canoes have in the waist. But it was presently apparent, fromthe sway of her rudder and the way she drifted into the course of thegunboat, that something was out of order with her. Gerilleau surveyed herthrough a field-glass, and became interested in the queer darkness of theface of the sitting man, a red-faced man he seemed, without a nose--crouching he was rather than sitting, and the longer the captain lookedthe less he liked to look at him, and the less able he was to take hisglasses away.

But he did so at last, and went a little way to call up Holroyd. Then hewent back to hail the cuberta. He ailed her again, and so she drove pasthim. _Santa Rosa_ stood out clearly as her name.

As she came by and into the wake of the monitor, she pitched a little, andsuddenly the figure of the crouching an collapsed as though all its jointshad given way. His hat fell off, his head was not nice to look at, and hisbody flopped lax and rolled out of sight behind the bulwarks.

"Caramba!" cried Gerilleau, and resorted to Holroyd forthwith.

Holroyd was half-way up the companion. "Did you see dat?" said thecaptain.

"It was--ugh!--I have no words." And the captain suddenly turned his backon Holroyd and became an active and strident commander.

The gunboat came about, steamed parallel to the erratic course of thecanoe, and dropped the boat with Lieutenant da Cunha and three sailors toboard her. Then the curiosity of the captain made him draw up almostalongside as the lieutenant got aboard, so that the whole of the _SantaRosa_, deck and hold, was visible to Holroyd.

He saw now clearly that the sole crew of the vessel was these two deadmen, and though he could not see their faces, he saw by their outstretchedhands, which were all of ragged flesh, that they had been subjected tosome strange exceptional process of decay. For a moment his attentionconcentrated on those two enigmatical bundles of dirty clothes and laxlyflung limbs, and then his eyes went forward to discover the open holdpiled high with trunks and cases, and aft, to where the little cabin gapedinexplicably empty. Then he became aware that the planks of the middledecking were dotted with moving black specks.

His attention was riveted by these specks. They were all walking indirections radiating from the fallen man in a manner--the image cameunsought to his mind--like the crowd dispersing from a bull-fight.

He became aware of Gerilleau beside him. "Capo," he said, "have you yourglasses? Can you focus as closely as those planks there?"

Gerilleau made an effort, grunted, and handed him the glasses.

There followed a moment of scrutiny. "It's ants," said the Englishman, andhanded the focused field-glass back to Gerilleau.

His impression of them was of a crowd of large black ants, very likeordinary ants except for their size, and for the fact that some of thelarger of them bore a sort of clothing of grey. But at the time hisinspection was too brief for particulars. The head of Lieutenant da Cunhaappeared over the side of the cuberta, and a brief colloquy ensued.

"You must go aboard," said Gerilleau.

The lieutenant objected that the boat was full of ants.

"You have your boots," said Gerilleau.

The lieutenant changed the subject. "How did these en die?" he asked.

Captain Gerilleau embarked upon speculations that Holroyd could notfollow, and the two men disputed with a certain increasing vehemence.Holroyd took up the field-glass and resumed his scrutiny, first of theants and then of the dead man amidships.

He has described these ants to me very particularly.

He says they were as large as any ants he has ever seen, black and movingwith a steady deliberation very different from the mechanical fussiness ofthe common ant. About one in twenty was much larger than its fellows, andwith an exceptionally large head. These reminded him at once of the masterworkers who are said to rule over the leaf-cutter ants; like them theyseemed to be directing and co-ordinating the general movements. Theytilted their bodies back in a manner altogether singular as if they madesome use of the fore feet. And he had a curious fancy that he was too faroff to verify, that most of these ants of both kinds were wearingaccoutrements, had things strapped about their bodies by bright whitebands like white metal threads...

He put down the glasses abruptly, realising that the question ofdiscipline between the captain and his subordinate had become acute.

"It is your duty," said the captain, "to go aboard. It is myinstructions."

The lieutenant seemed on the verge of refusing. The head of one of themulatto sailors appeared beside him.

"I believe these men were killed by the ants," said Holroyd abruptly inEnglish.

The captain burst into a rage. He made no answer to Holroyd. "I havecommanded you to go aboard," he screamed to his subordinate in Portuguese."If you do not go aboard forthwith it is mutiny--rank mutiny. Mutiny andcowardice! Where is the courage that should animate us? I will have you inirons, I will have you shot like a dog." He began a torrent of abuse andcurses, he danced to and fro. He shook his fists, he behaved as if besidehimself with rage, and the lieutenant, white and still, stood looking athim. The crew appeared forward, with amazed faces.

Suddenly, in a pause of this outbreak, the lieutenant came to some heroicdecision, saluted, drew himself together and clambered upon the deck ofthe cuberta.

"Ah!" said Gerilleau, and his mouth shut like a trap. Holroyd saw the antsretreating before da Cunha's boots. The Portuguese walked slowly to thefallen man, stooped down, hesitated, clutched his coat and turned himover. A black swarm of ants rushed out of the clothes, and da Cunhastepped back very quickly and trod two or three times on the deck.

Holroyd put up the glasses. He saw the scattered ants about the invader'sfeet, and doing what he had never seen ants doing before. They had nothingof the blind movements of the common ant; they were looking at him--as arallying crowd of men might look at some gigantic monster that haddispersed it.

"How did he die?" the captain shouted.

Holroyd understood the Portuguese to say the body was too much eaten totell.

"What is there forward?" asked Gerilleau.

The lieutenant walked a few paces, and began his answer in Portuguese. Hestopped abruptly and beat off something from his leg. He made somepeculiar steps as if he was trying to stamp on something invisible, andwent quickly towards the side. Then he controlled himself, turned about,walked deliberately forward to the hold, clambered up to the fore decking,from which the sweeps are worked, stooped for a time over the second man,groaned audibly, and made his way back and aft to the cabin, moving veryrigidly. He turned and began a conversation with his captain, cold andrespectful in tone on either side, contrasting vividly with the wrath andinsult of a few moments before. Holroyd gathered only fragments of itspurport.

He reverted to the field-glass, and was surprised to find the ants hadvanished from all the exposed surfaces of the deck. He turned towards theshadows beneath the decking, and it seemed to him they were full ofwatching eyes.

The cuberta, it was agreed; was derelict, but too full of ants to put menaboard to sit and sleep: it must be towed. The lieutenant went forward totake in and adjust the cable, and the men in the boat stood up to be readyto help him. Holroyd's glasses searched the canoe.

He became more and more impressed by the fact that a great if minute andfurtive activity was going on. He perceived that a number of giganticants--they seemed nearly a couple of inches in length--carryingoddly-shaped burthens for which he could imagine no use--were moving inrushes from one point of obscurity to another. They did not move in columnsacross the exposed places, but in open, spaced-out lines, oddly suggestiveof the rushes of modern infantry advancing under fire. A number weretaking cover under the dead man's clothes, and a perfect swarm wasgathering along the side over which da Cunha must presently go.

He did not see them actually rush for the lieutenant as he returned, buthe has no doubt they did make a concerted rush. Suddenly the lieutenantwas shouting and cursing and beating at his legs. "I'm stung!" he shouted,with a face of hate and accusation towards Gerilleau.

Then he vanished over the side, dropped into his boat, and plunged at onceinto the water. Holroyd heard the splash.

The three men in the boat pulled him out and brought him aboard, and thatnight he died.

III.

Holroyd and the captain came out of the cabin in which the swollen andcontorted body of the lieutenant lay and stood together at the stern ofthe monitor, staring at the sinister vessel they trailed behind them. Itwas a close, dark night that had only phantom flickerings of sheetlightning to illuminate it. The cuberta, a vague black triangle, rockedabout in the steamer's wake, her sails bobbing and flapping, and the blacksmoke from the funnels, spark-lit ever and again, streamed over herswaying masts.

Gerilleau's mind was inclined to run on the unkind things the lieutenanthad said in the heat of his last fever.

"He says I murdered 'im," he protested. "It is simply absurd. Someone_'ad_ to go aboard. Are we to run away from these confounded antswhenever they show up?"

Holroyd said nothing. He was thinking of a disciplined rush of littleblack shapes across bare sunlit planking.

"It was his place to go," harped Gerilleau. "He died in the execution ofhis duty. What has he to complain of? Murdered!... But the poor fellowwas--what is it?--demented. He was not in his right mind. The poisonswelled him... U'm."

They came to a long silence.

"We will sink that canoe--burn it."

"And then?"

The inquiry irritated Gerilleau. His shoulders went up, his hands flew outat right angles from his body. "What is one to _do?_" he said, hisvoice going up to an angry squeak.

Holroyd was not moved to conversation. A distant ululation of howlingmonkeys filled the sultry night with foreboding sounds, and as the gunboatdrew near the black mysterious banks this was reinforced by a depressingclamour of frogs.

"What is one to _do?_" the captain repeated after a vast interval,and suddenly becoming active and savage and blasphemous, decided to burnthe _Santa Rosa_ without further delay. Everyone aboard was pleasedby that idea, everyone helped with zest; they pulled in the cable, cut it,and dropped the boat and fired her with tow and kerosene, and soon thecuberta was crackling and flaring merrily amidst the immensities of thetropical night. Holroyd watched the mounting yellow flare against theblackness, and the livid flashes of sheet lightning that came and wentabove the forest summits, throwing them into momentary silhouette, and hisstoker stood behind him watching also.

The stoker was stirred to the depths of his linguistics. "_Saüba_ gopop, pop," he said, "Wahaw" and laughed richly.

But Holroyd was thinking that these little creatures on the decked canoehad also eyes and brains.

The whole thing impressed him as incredibly foolish and wrong, but--whatwas one to _do_? This question came back enormously reinforced on themorrow, when at last the gunboat reached Badama.

This place, with its leaf-thatch-covered houses and sheds, itscreeper-invaded sugar-mill, its little jetty of timber and canes, was verystill in the morning heat, and showed never a sign of living men. Whateverants there were at that distance were too small to see.

"All the people have gone," said Gerilleau, "but we will do one thinganyhow. We will 'oot and vissel."

So Holroyd hooted and whistled.

Then the captain fell into a doubting fit of the worst kind. "Dere is onething we can do," he said presently, "What's that?" said Holroyd.

"'Oot and vissel again."

So they did.

The captain walked his deck and gesticulated to himself. He seemed to havemany things on his mind. Fragments of speeches came from his lips. Heappeared to be addressing some imaginary public tribunal either in Spanishor Portuguese. Holroyd's improving ear detected something aboutammunition. He came out of these preoccupations suddenly into English. "Mydear 'Olroyd!" he cried, and broke off with "But what _can_ one do?"

They took the boat and the field-glasses, and went close in to examine theplace. They made out a number of big ants, whose still postures had acertain effect of watching them, dotted about the edge of the rudeembarkation jetty. Gerilleau tried ineffectual pistol shots at these.Holroyd thinks he distinguished curious earthworks running between thenearer houses, that may have been the work of the insect conquerors ofthose human habitations. The explorers pulled past the jetty, and becameaware of a human skeleton wearing a loin cloth, and very bright and cleanand shining, lying beyond. They came to a pause regarding this...

"I 'ave all dose lives to consider," said Gerilleau suddenly.

Holroyd turned and stared at the captain, realising slowly that hereferred to the unappetising mixture of races that constituted his crew.

"To send a landing party--it is impossible--impossible. They will bepoisoned, they will swell, they will swell up and abuse me and die. It istotally impossible... If we land, I must land alone, alone, in thickboots and with my life in my hand. Perhaps I should live. Or again--Imight not land. I do not know. I do not know."

Holroyd thought he did, but he said nothing.

"De whole thing," said Gerilleau suddenly, "'as been got up to make meridiculous. De whole thing!"

They paddled about and regarded the clean white skeleton from variouspoints of view, and then they returned to the gunboat. Then Gerilleau'sindecisions became terrible. Steam was got up, and in the afternoon themonitor went on up the river with an air of going to ask somebodysomething, and by sunset came back again and anchored. A thunderstormgathered and broke furiously, and then the night became beautifully cooland quiet and everyone slept on deck. Except Gerilleau, who tossed aboutand muttered. In the dawn he awakened Holroyd.

"Lord!" said Holroyd, "what now?"

"I have decided," said the captain.

"What--to land?" said Holroyd, sitting up brightly.

"No!" said the captain, and was for a time very reserved. "I havedecided," he repeated, and Holroyd manifested symptoms of impatience.

"Well,--yes," said the captain, "_I shall fire de big gun!_"

And he did! Heaven knows what the ants thought of it, but he did. He firedit twice with great sternness and ceremony. All the crew had wadding intheir ears, and there was an effect of going into action about the wholeaffair, and first they hit and wrecked the old sugar-mill, and then theysmashed the abandoned store behind the jetty. And then Gerilleauexperienced the inevitable reaction.

"It is no good," he said to Holroyd; "no good at all. No sort of ballygood. We must go back--for instructions. Dere will be de devil of a rowabout dis ammunition--oh! de _devil_ of a row! You don't know,'Olroyd..."

He stood regarding the world in infinite perplexity for a space.

"But what else was there to _do?_" he cried.

In the afternoon the monitor started down stream again, and in the eveninga landing party took the body of the lieutenant and buried it on the bankupon which the new ants have so far not appeared...

IV.

I heard this story in a fragmentary state from Holroyd not three weeksago.

These new ants have got into his brain, and he has come back to Englandwith the idea, as he says, of "exciting people" about them "before it istoo late." He says they threaten British Guiana, which cannot be much overa trifle of a thousand miles from their present sphere of activity, andthat the Colonial Office ought to get to work upon them at once. Hedeclaims with great passion: "These are intelligent ants. Just think whatthat means!"

There can be no doubt they are a serious pest, and that the BrazilianGovernment is well advised in offering a prize of five hundred pounds forsome effectual method of extirpation. It is certain too that since theyfirst appeared in the hills beyond Badama, about three years ago, theyhave achieved extraordinary conquests. The whole of the south bank of theBatemo River, for nearly sixty miles, they have in their effectualoccupation; they have driven men out completely, occupied plantations andsettlements, and boarded and captured at least one ship. It is even saidthey have in some inexplicable way bridged the very considerable Capuaranaarm and pushed many miles towards the Amazon itself. There can be littledoubt that they are far more reasonable and with a far better socialorganisation than any previously known ant species; instead of being indispersed societies they are organised into what is in effect a singlenation; but their peculiar and immediate formidableness lies not so muchin this as in the intelligent use they make of poison against their largerenemies. It would seem this poison of theirs is closely akin to snakepoison, and it is highly probable they actually manufacture it, and thatthe larger individuals among them carry the needle-like crystals of it intheir attacks upon men.

Of course it is extremely difficult to get any detailed information aboutthese new competitors for the sovereignty of the globe. No eye-witnessesof their activity, except for such glimpses as Holroyd's, have survivedthe encounter. The most extraordinary legends of their prowess andcapacity are in circulation in the region of the Upper Amazon, and growdaily as the steady advance of the invader stimulates men's imaginationsthrough their fears. These strange little creatures are credited not onlywith the use of implements and a knowledge of fire and metals and withorganised feats of engineering that stagger our northern minds--unused aswe are to such feats as that of the Saübas of Rio de Janeiro, who in 1841drove a tunnel under the Parahyba where it is as wide as the Thames atLondon Bridge--but with an organised and detailed method of record andcommunication analogous to our books. So far their action has been asteady progressive settlement, involving the flight or slaughter of everyhuman being in the new areas they invade. They are increasing rapidly innumbers, and Holroyd at least is firmly convinced that they will finallydispossess man over the whole of tropical South America.

And why should they stop at tropical South America?

Well, there they are, anyhow. By 1911 or thereabouts, if they go on asthey are going, they ought to strike the Capuarana Extension Railway, andforce themselves upon the attention of the European capitalist.

By 1920 they will be half-way down the Amazon. I fix 1950 or '60 at thelatest for the discovery of Europe.